John gestured again: “go forward”! And now, slowly the braves moved a little closer as if their own looming presence alone could move the deer toward the river. They were right. The empathy between deer and Powhatan was such that the deer did not need to hear, did not need to see. The stag’s head was up again and he went determinedly down the path which the farmer had once trod from his maize field to his pier, and the does and fawns followed behind.
John waved, “on, on,” and the deer went faster, and the hunters went faster behind them. Then, as if they could sense the excitement before they could even hear or smell or see, the deer knew they were being pursued; and they threw their heads back and their dark liquid eyes rolled, and they trotted and then they cantered, and then they flung themselves headlong down the little muddy single-file path to the deceptive safety of the pier as it stretched out into the river like an avenue to a haven.
The braves broke into a run following them, each one fitting an arrow to his bow as he ran, a faultless smooth gesture, even while dancing around fallen trees, leaping logs. John fumbled for his arrow, dropped it in his haste, put his hand to his hip for another and found that his quiver had been torn from him as he ran. He was weaponless. He threw aside his bow in a burst of impatience but his feet pounded faster still.
The deer were following a trail, the braves were filtering through thick forest but still they went as fast as the herd, they kept pace with them, they were the power behind the herd, driving it forward, exactly to the place where John wanted them to go, to the wooden causeway, out into the river.
“Yes!” he cried. The braves broke from the trees in a perfect crescent, the herd a tossing tawny mass of horn and eyes and heads and thundering feet cupped inside the circle of running men. “Now!” John yelled, a great passion for the deer and for the hunt rising up in him. He felt a great desire to kill a deer, thus owning it and this moment forever: the moment that John led his hunting party and took his deer.
But just as that moment was there, just as the first deer leaped down to the causeway to the illusion of safety, and lost her footing at once on the slippery betraying timbers, and an arrow went zing through the air and pierced her pounding heart, just as the others were ready to follow her, one young buck jinked to the right, to the bank, to the clear run downriver to freedom, and another, seeing the sudden spurt of his pace, followed him, and Tradescant saw in that split second of time that his cup of braves was not holding, that his herd of deer would be lost, spilled like quicksilver out of an alchemist’s goblet, and would run away downriver.
“No!” he yelled. “No! My deer!” And now he was not thinking of Suckahanna, nor of his pride, nor of the respect of Attone and the other braves. Now he was intent, determined that his plan should work, that his beautiful strategy should be beautifully performed and that no fleet, infuriating beast should spoil the perfection of the moment of the hunt. “No!”
At once he was running in great jolting, ground-eating strides, running as he had never run before, to plug the gap in the line, to outpace the first hunter on the extreme right, to stop the deer escaping from his goblet, his beautiful, deer-filled goblet. Attone, his arrow on a string, heard the yell as the Englishman, his long hair flying behind him, took breakneck strides, great leaps down the hill, watched openmouthed, even forgetting the imperative of the hunt, as the Englishman yelled, “No!” and while yelling outpaced one, two and then three hunters, and flung himself toward the breach.
John’s sudden eruption caused terror in the herd. Instead of slipping away through the gap they doubled back and met the upstream wing of the hunters. There was nowhere for them to go but out into the river, on the slippery causeway. One after another they leaped and scrabbled for it. Their sharp hooves could gain no purchase on the greasy, half-rotted wood, they fell, they pitched into the river, there was a hail of arrows.
But John did not see any of this. All he saw was the gap in his plan, the breach in the perfection of his hunt, and a deer jinking and swerving to get past him. He ran, he ran toward it, his hands outstretched as if he would catch it by the throat. The deer caught sight of him and went for freedom, made a great leap down the steep bank to the river, splashed into the water, fought its way to the surface and laid its smooth head back so the wet, dark nose was able to pant, and it was able to swim, sharp legs flailing, to the center of the river.
John, unable to bear the sight of his prey escaping, let out a desperate “Hulloah!” and flung himself, as if he thought he could fly, down the six-foot riverbank and into the water, on top of the deer, falling head first in a wild dive so there was a resounding crack as deer skull met John’s forehead, and while he was still blinded by the blow they plunged down into the depths of the river and rose up together, and even gazed into each other’s startled, desperate eyes. John felt his hands close around the deer’s throat before a sharp hoof struck him like a bullet in his chest and pushed him down below the water again.
Attone, far from letting fly with his arrow at the disappearing head, far from picking off the deer which were slithering and plunging off the causeway, found that he was screaming with laughter at the sight of the Englishman, the despised, overanxious, women-guarded Englishman howling like a spirit from the dark world, bounding as if he could outrun a deer, and then diving headfirst into a shallow river. A man so filled with bloodlust, so insane with desire, that he could come nose to nose in deep water with a deer and still close his hands around its throat.
Attone gripped a tree for support and called in English: “Englishman! Englishman! Are you dead? Or just mad?”
Tradescant, surfacing and realizing suddenly that he was in cold, weedy water, that he had neither bow nor arrow nor kill, but instead a sensation very like a broken rib and a hoof-shaped bruise over his heart, and a cracked head for his pains, heard also the irresistible laughter of a Powhatan engulfed by amusement, and started to laugh too. He paddled like a weak dog to the water’s edge and then found he was laughing too much to climb up the bank. It was absurdly high and he recalled that he had dived off the top of it and actually landed head first on the deer. The thought made him collapse in laughter again, and the sight of Attone holding out his hand, his brown face creased in helpless laughter, redoubled Tradescant’s own amusement.
He gripped Attone’s hand but it was too much for both of them and their grip slipped as their helpless giggles weakened them so that all Attone could do was fall back on the soft grass of the riverbank and give himself up to it, while Tradescant lay back in the river and howled like a dog at the thought of his hunt and his madness and his incompetence.
When Suckahanna saw the men coming back to camp she went out slowly to greet them; she was proud, and this was a difficult matter for any woman. Her husband was the finest hunter among the people but she was proposing to leave him for an Englishman who had been seen by everyone as incapable of even shooting a pigeon with one of the white man’s infallible guns.
First he saw the kill. Six of the hunters carried in three deer lashed by their feet to pruned branches. It was a kill that any hunting party would have been proud to bring home, enough to feed the village and leave surplus meat for salting down. Suckahanna breathed in sharply and drew herself a little higher. She would not be seen by anyone running up to the braves and asking them who had done the kill. But three deer was a successful hunt; three deer was undeniable evidence that the braves on the hunt had done well.